Virtual local area networks (VLANs) have been utilized for decades to extending private networks across geographical distances using the Internet while still providing isolation of network traffic from other Internet traffic. As cloud-based applications become more widespread, VLANs are a natural choice for enabling communication between geographically diverse virtual machines that nonetheless belong to the same cloud tenant and application. Native VLAN support, however, only provides for the establishment of 4,096 different VLANs within a network. In cloud-based networks, where the number of potential tenants can number in the tens or hundreds of thousands, this limit generally renders native VLAN usage insufficient.